In addition to announcing a new partnership with Samsung, which will bring its paid keyboard app complete with a themes pack for free to Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge buyers, Fleksy made one more major announcement this week, introducing a brand new feature that you wouldn’t normally see in apps like this. More →

The Internet has evolved at an incredible pace. Websites that looked amazing less than a decade ago are absolutely hideous by today’s standards — even the websites that are now worth billions of dollars.

As has become the trend, celebrities dominated the charts in Yahoo’s yearly ranking of top searches for 2014. Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus are unsurprising additions to the list, but climbing its way into ninth position is one device that people around the country are still lining up for months after launch: the iPhone 6. More →

If Yahoo and Microsoft have anything to say about it, Google won’t be the default search engine for the iPhone in 2015. According to The Information, Apple’s contract with Google, the contract which allows Google to remain the default search engine in the Safari mobile and desktop browser, is up next year.

It’s unclear whether or not Apple is actively looking to replace Google, but Yahoo and Microsoft have reportedly both begun pitching their search engines to Apple’s senior VP Eddy Cue. More →

When you go on to Yahoo, you’ll notice the same things you’ve noticed for the past 20 years: Search bar and the directory. This past Friday, Yahoo announced on Tumblr that one of these things will go. Can you guess which?

Yahoo will offer its users full end-to-end email encryption and compatibility with Google’s own end-to-end email encryption at some point in 2015, CNET reports, as Yahoo chief information security officer Alex Stamos on Thursday confirmed the company’s email encryption plans at the Black Hat conference. More →

Back in mid-February — on Valentine’s Day, in fact — I included Aviate in a collection of 5 great Android apps that can do amazing things the iPhone cannot. The app was using a queue system for new users, and it often took more than a week for new accounts to be activated. Receiving an invite from an existing Aviate user would bypass the queue and give users instant access, and I mentioned in my coverage that I had a few invites left.

Four months later, people still contact me almost every day looking for invites — that’s how hot Aviate is among Android users. And now, Yahoo-owned Aviate has finally opened up the app so that anyone can begin using it as soon as they download it. More →

Marissa Mayer has been Yahoo’s CEO for nearly two years and in that time she has revamped many of Yahoo’s websites and apps, and has made some major purchases. Most notably, Yahoo bought Tumblr a little over a year ago for $1.1 billion. Now, however, this purchase isn’t looking so good. According to a ComScore report in the Wall Street Journal, traffic to Tumblr has dropped from a peak of 49 million visitors in December to only 42 million in March. If these numbers are accurate, this loss of 7 million visitors would represent a 15% drop. There’s no obvious reason for this big decline, either: Since the acquisition, Yahoo hasn’t done much to change Tumblr, staying true to its promise to not ruin Tumblr. Yahoo has tried to monetize Tumblr and has been struggling to attract advertisers, and this decrease in traffic will not help their efforts.

Yahoo may help Apple deliver a huge blow to Google’s bottom line in the future, as Marissa Mayer wants its search engine to become the default option on iOS devices. Re/code reports that the company is focusing its search efforts around mobile, preparing to pitch Apple its own take to mobile search. More →

Heartbleed is a very scary bug that came to light recently and once again sent the Internet into a frenzy with talk about how to protect yourself from security vulnerabilities and hackers. Several sites also published guides covering how to protect yourself from Heartbleed, suggesting that using stronger passwords could somehow have kept users safe from having their data compromised by Heartbleed. Using complex passwords is always a good idea, but even the longest password would have been vulnerable in the case of this particular flaw. What would have offered users solid protection, however, is two-step verification. More →

Yahoo’s growth appears to be in some way dependent on the widespread acquisition and subsequent annihilation of some of the Internet’s most promising startups, and no one can figure out why. ReadWrite reports that since Marissa Mayer took over in July 2012, 31 of 38 startup companies acquired by the search giant have had their services shut down, often to the detriment of users who had begun incorporating those services into their daily lives. Vizify, a data visualization company and recent acquisition of Yahoo, immediately notified users that all of its products and services will cease to exist in the near future once the deal was finalized. More →

We’ve read a lot of shocking things about the National Security Agency’s spying practices but this new revelation might be the most shocking one yet. The Guardian reports that the NSA has helped British spy agency GCHQ capture and store millions of images from Yahoo users’ webcam chats with one another, even though most of the users in question weren’t targets of intelligence surveillance programs. Yahoo has, of course, denied any prior knowledge of this program’s existence and has condemned it as “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy.” More →